| Firm. Clients head home | | Released: 19/03/2003 09:01 AM | | | Leading Asia Pacific mining recruitment firm John Davidson and Associates says Australian mining professionals returning from Indonesia and Papua New Guinea are helping to bolster the industry's human resource stocks at home.
While principal John Davidson said Indonesia still offered an attractive place for industry people to work, he said jobs were becoming more scarce as mine owners switched to more streamlined contractor-run operations and the impact of the government's foreign ownership laws saw Australian and big multi-national miners reduce investment. PNG's maturing major mines and dearth of new projects were not stimulating job growth.
After many years as a leading provider of recruitment services to companies operating in Indonesia and PNG, Brisbane-based JDA is putting increased emphasis on growing its Australian business. The strategy has seen it open an office in Perth and step up promotion of its extensive database to local companies.
"We've kept ourselves ahead of the game and ahead of our competitors with our communications and our database,"Davidson said. "Our database is in three segments" there's the candidate database where there's 30,000 CVs, a client database with a heap of information about each client, and a job order system.
There is an increasing danger that recruitment consultants are becoming irrelevant. Anyone with the technology available to them that's half switched on can go out and grab a handful of CVs. With us, we have a great advantage on our competitors in that in our office we have four mining engineers, a metallurgist, a chemical engineer, and someone from every engineering discipline. We have credibility with clients because we can talk technically to them. Obviously it costs us a lot in overheads but right from the start, the line managers are very comfortable with that. That's value-adding right from the start.
"We process about 300 CVs a week but at the same time we take some out so the net increase is about 250. The database is growing rapidly. We're not just mining; we're everything to do with mining. We thought that the growth and the size of our documentationwould be a problem but the capacity of computers is growing so quickly that there's just really no limit to it anymore."
With about 3500 mining engineers on its database, JDA is acutely aware of the demand for experienced personnel in this part of the mining job market. Davidson said the lack of mining engineers was threatening a departure from past employment cycles by becoming a more enduring problem. "I can't see the momentum changing," he said, adding that university graduate numbers were low. "We are going to focus more and more on the mining engineers because we predict a ridiculous shortage of such people down the track."
JDA, which derives income from commission-based appointments or the provision of consultancy services, decided last year to return to Perth after an absence of several years.
"Queensland is our headquarters and there's a lot happening there, but in the mining industry the Western Australia initiative is a major priority for us," Davidson said.
"I believe that we as recruiters have to comprehensively understand the client's business. We have to have people in our team who are mining people and we do have those people. They really understand and pre-empt where the business is coming from."
Source: Australian Mining Monthly, March 2003
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